Collected Miscellany

If you’re visiting the Upper Left Coast early next week (perhaps you’re a Portuguese explorer or a British map-maker) sail into Ballard for the First Fiction Tour. A quartet of new authors will be at the Sunset in Ballard at 7pm on Tuesday. The group includes Miranda Beverly-Whittemore whose The Effects of Light was reviewed here last week. She should feel somewhat at home in Seattle having grown up in the Rose City a mere three hour, two hamburger drive away.

According to John Marshall, the Seattle PI’s book critic, the original announcement of the event listed the wrong day. Once you’ve beached your vessel check with the University Bookstore if you’re still confused about the details.

Ballard is part of Seattle. The principal language is Swedish and you’ll notice dozens of elderly Volvos in mint condition gathered near the Konditerei. Most of the signs refer to the No Parking regs and are depicted as a Volvo with a red line drawn on the diagonal accompanied by an exclamation mark. Early settlers built a bunch of good restaurants along Shilshole Bay. For the explorer there’s not much Portuguese fare and no one knows what British food is. Try the salmon. Visit the fish ladder then go meet the authors.

I thought it worth noting that two new blog ventures have come to my attention this week. They are worth checking out if you haven’t already:

– The Valve is a new group blog started by John Holbo and others. Here is a snippet from the Statement of Purpose:

We mean to foster debate and circulation of ideas in literary studies and contiguous academic areas. Since a narrow academic focus would be unlikely to serve this primary project, our focus is not narrowly academic, nor purely literary. Authors are free to wander so long as they do not make positive nuisances of themselves with respect to our general aims.

Worth keeping an eye on.

– Also new is the LitBlog Co-op their banner offers the following:

Uniting the leading literary weblogs for the purpose of drawing attention to the best of contemporary fiction, authors and presses that are struggling to be noticed in a flooded marketplace.

Sounds interesting to me. The usual cast of characters is involved and up to no good as usual ;-)

Look for the first READ THIS selection on May 15.

To catch up with the author’s career: The Confession was released last year by St. Martins Press. His first novel, The Bridge of Sighs, was published a few years back; his next, 36 Yalta Boulevard will be released later this year. This Friday review serves a double purpose; one to take a look at the novel, the other to introduce readers to the author. Steinhauer, a native of Texas, lives in Budapest. The setting for The Confession is an unspecified country inside the Iron Curtain. The action occurs during the Fifties. The Soviet invasion of Hungary forms a part of the novel’s backdrop.

The main character, Ferenc Kolyeszar, is a homicide inspector with the State Militia. He and his colleagues are cops, but also part of the machinery of the secret police. The apparent suicide of an alcoholic triggers an investigation that reveals a much larger canvas. Ferenc is dealing with his disintegrating marriage; when he learns that his oldest friend has slept with his wife, Ferenc’s despair finds a focus.

Ferenc is a novelist as well as a policeman. He has friends among the artists and writers in the city, a place referred to only as the Capitol. The atmosphere is infused with the oppression of the era; like many of his countrymen Ferenc survived the German invasion and occupation only to find himself under the heel of the Russians. When a KGB agent named Kaminsky enters the scene it sets up further complications; the Russian seems to have more than a casual interest in Ferenc’s investigation.

Tensions between Ferenc and Kaminsky erupt during a demonstration. Ordered to club protestors Ferenc refuses and turns his rage on the KGB man. The discovery of another murder victim with links to the suicide plunges the cops deeper into the murky past, to the killing of a fellow officer nine years earlier.

The Confession works on several layers of intrigue and drama. Ferenc’s marriage, his career, and his freedom are at stake as the author blends the plotlines with considerable skill. Even more impressive is the use of setting to underscore the dreary malaise of a man struggling to do the right thing under impossible circumstances. The secondary characters are well drawn in the same low key manner the principals are presented. The story’s pacing is deliberate, the wheel turns slowly but inexorably, each event bringing Ferenc closer to the truth. In a repressed society nothing is more dangerous than the truth.

I never compare an author’s work to someone else’s. Olen Steinhauer brings a hint of modern sensibility to the political intrigue he presents, enough to make it his own. I’m looking forward to reading his next novel.

[by way of Powerline] Columnist John Podhoretz writes on a University of Chicago seminar series with Saul Bellow and Allan Bloom.

Bloom was a tall, imposing man–sloppy and careless, dripping cigarette ash that would burn little holes in his very expensive suits and ties. He spoke loudly, often exploding into laughter at his own cleverness and compelling attention with a strange stutter,

Bellow, by contrast, was neat and precise, slight and thin; he spoke in a quiet and deliberate manner that commanded attention as easily as Bloom’s histrionics.

… [Bellow] would speak for three or four minutes. And when he was finished, you realized that what he had just done was spontaneously speak a beautifully written essay. Every word in every sentence had been exactly where it should have been, each sentence flowed perfectly from the last, without a pause or an “um” or any of the other verbal devices we lesser mortals use to gather our thoughts as we speak.

He goes on to describe a time Bellow showed Bloom that an old romance was wordy and difficult, not the “most profound depiction of romantic passion the world had ever seen” as Bloom thought it was.

John Podhoretz is a columnist for the New York Post and National Review Online, an editor with the Weekly Standard and ReganBooks, and a FOX News Channel contributor.

When reading Nick Arvin’s novel Articles of War, I was reminded of a snippet of lyrics from an old John Prine song: “Strangers had forced him to live in his head.” In Arvin’s haunting novel, an 18-year old Iowan named George Tilson – nicknamed Heck because he promised his now deceased mom he wouldn’t swear – comes face to face with the horrors of war after being sent to Europe during World War II. Facing this new reality, Heck, a naturally reticent Midwesterner, is in many ways “forced to live in his head” and to wrestle with the demons he finds there. Articles of War puts the reader inside Heck’s head as he tries to make sense not only of the seemingly unreal surroundings and circumstances he finds himself in, but of his reactions and the characteristics they reveal. The result is a lyrical yet disturbing portrait of the almost random chaos and violence – both mental and physical – of war.

There is a temptation – particularly in a time of war – to view Articles as an “anti-war” novel, but I think this misses the point. The story isn’t about war in the larger sense of geo-politics, moral philosophy, or the depravity of man. And, despite its vivid portrayal of the brutality, it isn’t really about how every war – no matter how well intentioned – turns out badly. No, what Arvin is getting at, in my opinion, is the “internalities” of war; what happens when flawed, and often fragile, human beings meet the extremes that war can bring. The Marianne Moore epigraph makes this clear: “There never was a war that was not inward.”

It may be a cliche, but it is nevertheless true that these types of events reveal people’s character in an almost raw way; they strip away the barriers we put up to hide our true selves. This is the process Heck finds himself in, much to his horror. Heck is a sort of prototypical Midwestern boy. He is straightforward and mild mannered, not prone to emotional outburst or gestures. He knows the value of hard work and persistence; knows how to “accept orders” even “tedious and exhausting” ones. He can shoot a gun. But under this competence lies doubt and fear. He has an “instinctive self-awareness of his own ignorance about many things.” As Heck is shipped from the safety of his boyhood home to the unknown terrors of war in Europe, he can feel his fear taking over.

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Author Saul Bellow, a native of Quebec and raised in Chicago, died this morning at age 89. He had won the big prizes and continued writing until the last several months. In this excerpt from It All Adds Up, Bellow describes a harsh, yet romantic, Chicago.

What Chicago gave to the world was goods—a standard of living sufficient for millions. Bread, bacon, overalls, gas ranges, radio sets, telephone directories, false teeth, light bulbs, tractors, settle rails, gasoline. I asked a German-Jewish refugee, just arrived, to tell me quickly, without thinking, his opinion of the city. What had impressed him most in Chicago? He said at once, “Stop and Shop”—the great food store on Washington Street, with its mountains of cheese, its vats of coffee, its ramparts of canned goods, curtains of sausage, stacks of steaks. Goods unlimited and cheap, the highest standards of living in the world, “and for the broad masses, not for an elite.” The “struggle for existence” went on under your eyes, but the very fact that we could even think about such a struggle meant that millions of well-fed people could afford to sit theorizing about the human condition.

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